Sports

[NCAA Tournament]

The Rebels’ furious rally an example of what UNLV could have been this season

UNLV guard Justin Hawkins celebrates his three-point shot that brought the Rebels to within two points of Colorado during their second round NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship game Thursday, March 15, 2012 in Albuquerque. It was the closest the Rebels got as UNLV lost the game 68-64.

Bellfield hit a shot. They forced two turnovers then hit another. Colorado called a timeout, and after a pair of Hawkins free throws they turned it over twice more in an 18-second span. A Bellfield 3 cut it to seven, a Marshall layup cut it to five and Hawkins’ 3-pointer with 4:19 to play made it a two-point game.

“We put ourselves in a very deep hole getting down 20, and when you do that everything has to go perfectly,” Rice said. “It almost did.”

All told it was a 12-0 run over four minutes that included six Colorado turnovers. Once UNLV started applying full-court pressure, the Buffs looked rattled for the first time all day and momentum very quickly shifted in the Rebels’ favor.

“Just wanted to leave it all out there. It wasn’t anything more than that,” Moser said.

Colorado could barely get into its offense, attempting only three shots during the rally. That UNLV lineup found a spark that had been missing the entire game and really the last month of the season.

“All I can think about is how we fought back, how we battled,” said Bellfield, who has played his final game in UNLV uniform. “If we did that before, maybe two minutes before or even in the first half, things would have been different.”

But they didn’t start it earlier. UNLV couldn’t put its offense and defense together until it started pressuring Colorado, and the Rebels didn’t start doing that until midway through the second half.

The risk with a press is giving up easy baskets, which Colorado eventually found when Carlon Brown broke away for a dunk with 2:27 left that seemed to calm the Buffaloes’ nerves. That put Colorado up by five, and UNLV couldn’t cut the deficit back to one possession until there were eight seconds left and the game was all but over.

“Everybody has heart on this team, we didn’t want to go out like that,” Bellfield said.

Rice talked about that run giving the team momentum into the off-season, a nice thought that reeks of “wait and see.” It’s very frustrating for the fans to see in that stretch what UNLV is capable of — and what they’ve been capable of all season — and not be able to figure out why it only came in spurts if at all.

Another early exit leaves another pile of questions. The run is a good tease, as Rice said, to build off if they can harness that energy and effort. But there’s no guarantee that it will lead to anything.